How to Eat Healthy When Everyone Around You Isn’t?

Adopting good eating habits is not easy. It is made even more difficult if people around you are gorging on delicious delicacies that you love. Maintaining a healthy diet is difficult if the people around you don’t want to eat healthy. It can be made a lot easier to fall into the trap of unhealthy eating. How can we prevent this? Read on to know more.

What is Healthy Eating? 

Eating healthy refers to having a pattern of diet in which you are consuming a balanced diet that covers the right amount of each food category such as fibre, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and fats. Healthy food habits ensure that you are meeting the required daily calorie intake, i.e. neither are you having more calories or less than your body requires. 

Eating healthy food and eating consciously is a practice that has many benefits. It helps you have the ideal body weight, glowing skin, and lower risks of heart disease, diabetes, and several other lifestyle-related health problems. 

The environment and the lifestyle greatly determine the eating habits that you follow. If you live in an environment in which people do not eat healthy, you will invariably end up eating unhealthy too.

So, how can we avoid this? What are the ways in which we can eat healthy ourselves and stay motivated to do so every day? 

The answers to these questions are in this article. Read on, to find out.

Tips to Ensure You Eat Healthy 

There are many ways to ensure we eat healthily. Some are listed below:

1. Make Conscious Choices When Eating Out

You do not necessarily need to eat at one single place for food. If your partner or the person you are getting food with is getting pizza but you want to eat a simple Indian home-style meal — the two options are quite opposite to each other and no one would like to compromise. 

The best way to make everyone happy is to make two stops so that both of you get what you want to eat and you are able to make healthier food choices and eat better. It will also ensure that no one is guilty of what they ate. In the end, it would be worth making the two stops.

2. Remove Unhealthy Foods 

The best way to avoid indulging in eating unhealthy food is by removing unhealthy food items  from your surroundings. The more healthy food options you keep in your stock, the more likely you are to eat better. Keeping a healthier diet as your option will make you eat more healthily. 

Diet options such as dry fruits, granola bars, etc. can be kept for the times when you have cravings. These would curb your desire to binge eat and keep you full for a long time, besides steering you towards healthier food choices. Eating habits definitely change for the better when we keep healthy foods around us. 

3. Keep Healthy Snacks with You

If your daily routine involves travelling by car or public transport, we would recommend you to carry some healthy snacks such as granola bars along with you in a bag. This would make it easy for you to resist the temptation of going to a drive-through for some fries and burgers. It is a great way to maintain your habit of eating healthy food and not give up soon due to your daily routine.

4. Start with Exercise

To match with healthy eating and maintain a healthy lifestyle, it is best that you start with intense 30 minutes of exercise. The duration of the exercise can increase gradually. This would help your body remove waste and toxins through the medium of sweat when you exercise.

During exercise to avoid feeling really tired and to get the best results, one can have a protein shake either before or after the workout sessions. Workouts such as Yoga, cardio, etc. can be done. 

To get good results, we suggest that you do the sessions under the guidance of a trainer. Daily exercise can help greatly reduce stress and the chances of having diseases.

5. Set Cheat Days 

This is a very important factor in good eating habits. You need to set cheat days so that you can give yourself a treat for eating healthy and all your efforts. This would act as a motivator for the rest of the days in which you would be eating healthily. 

What are the Benefits of Eating Healthy

There are several benefits of eating healthy. Some of them are listed below:

• Eating healthy helps improve the immunity of the body. Eating healthy builds a strong immune system. Eating healthy foods such as green vegetables, fruits, seafood, spices, and herbs helps our body a lot. 
• Healthy eating habits help achieve and maintain an ideal body weight. Healthy foods to eat include fruits, whole grains, vegetables, dairy products, etc. can help you maintain your ideal weight. Maintaining a suitable weight in your body will help you reduce the risk of getting life-threatening diseases. Fibre-rich foods help you control your craving by keeping you full for a longer time.
• They help keep the skin, teeth and eyes healthy as the body is getting a balanced diet which it needs. Having a diet rich in calcium and also eating things like carrots, fish, etc, help maintain the teeth and eyes.
• If one eats better and follows it as a lifestyle then they are in a better and healthier physical condition during old age. This is because the vital organs get ample nourishment due to a balanced diet and hormones and bone mineral density are maintained optimally. 
• By eating better one has a better chance of not getting chronic diseases like cancer and can avoid lifestyle diseases like PCOS, diabetes, hypertension etc as well. This in turn increases their lifespan and helps maintain good health in old age.

Lifestyle Changes That Support Healthy Eating

Lifestyle changes are necessary for good health. Some of the changes are listed below:

• Not having alcohol in excess positively impacts your health.
• Staying away from smoking or quitting it would help keep your lungs healthy.
• Exercising daily is another good lifestyle change which helps alongside eating healthy.
• Reducing or doing away with white sugar completely and opting for healthier sugar alternatives like brown sugar, jaggery, palm sugar etc is a great way to keep the extra kilos at bay.
• You can also avoid fried, preserved, packaged or processed foods. Always eat fresh and preferably home-cooked meals. 
• Incorporate ghee into your daily diet and do away with the excessive use of refined oils. Healthier oils like olive and mustard oil or til oil are great choices. 
• Daily meditation and deep breathing exercises work wonders for your health. 
• Set a sleep schedule and steer clear of habits that lead to sleep deficits. 

Conclusion 

Following a healthy lifestyle with supportive exercise holds lots of benefits. Eating habits would matter a lot in the long run and you would also see the results and the changes in your body. Having cheat days in between would greatly improve the urge to eat better as cheat days would act as a reward for eating healthy the whole week. We hope this article helps you in making your life a healthy one.